“I never used Excel at work but I saw other people making pretty graphs and thought, ‘I could probably draw with that,’” says 73-year old Tatsuo Horiuchi. About 13 years ago, shortly before retiring, Horiuchi decide he needed a new challenge in his life. So he bought a computer and began experimenting with Excel. “Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers,” explained Horiuchi. “And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint.”*

Horiuchi also tried working with Microsoft Word but it didn’t offer the flexibility that Excel did. “Take that, Wall St. analysts,” he later added. (not really)

Horiuchi first gained attention when, in 2006, he entered an Excel Autoshape Art Contest. His work, which was far-superior than the other entries, blew the judges away. Horiuchi took first place and went on to create work that has been acquired by his local Gunma Museum of Art.

Don’t believe these were made in Excel? You can even download the excel file and play around with it yourself:

I’m 75 – Back in the 70s (when I was learning AutoCAD) but had no other graphics software other than Paint, I did some art creations using AutoCAD’s polylines (changing the widths of them multiple times) and copying and rotating, stretching etc. One that I save a few coping of printout was a large group of whooping cranes. I used the program mostly for HVAC and electrical designs for Zenith Corp factories at the time (I was a facilities engineer for over 9 years there)

So, as far as I can tell, these are just images pasted into an XL sheet.
How were the images created? Here are the graphs or formulas? How exactly was XL used to create these?
I downloaded both files and looked for hidden sheets or formulas and didn’t find anything so I am a little skeptical.
Thoughts?

I still don’t get what’s “Excel” about this. I can “ungroup” and move/stretch shapes around, too. But, for instance, there’s a swan in the middle of the cherry blossoms picture. Where did he draw the swan? Did he freehand that using some other software and copy it into Excel?

Can’t someone just do something like this by “drawing” into a large spreadsheet using “fill” (the paint can on the home tab) and then shrinking it down, so it doesn’t look pixellated.

mth: The swan itself can be ungrouped as well. The smallest shapes it contains are polygons with various fills. The swan’s tail or whatever is a hook-shaped polygon made of manually placed points with a white to grayish gradient to give it shading. The other parts of the image are created similarly.

Even using cold office equipment like Excel that’s not meant for art, he captures the essence of nature in the finest execution in the Japanese style. The colors, the composition – it’s like Ukyo-e but digital! Hiroshige would be proud.

Severe intellectual fail. He didn’t prove any such thing. What’s remarkable is that even *after* Mr. Horiuchi both states and demonstrates with his beautiful work that Excel has more drawing functions and that they are easier to use than Paint, a program designed specifically for drawing, so many people make comments based on their own prior beliefs and expectations about Excel rather than on its capabilities that have just been demonstrated.

“Even using cold office equipment like Excel that’s not meant for art”

Another foolish statement. Pens and pencils are also “cold office equipment” not meant specifically for art, but they provide that capability, as does Excel which has features designed specifically for producing *artwork* … it has polygon fill and gradients; it is not “any tool”. Not even Mr. Horiuchi can make art with a disk defragmenter or an anti-virus program.

“‘Cause using Illustrator for Vector-based graphics is too mainstream”